Category Archives for 520 Replacement

Happy birthday ol’ floater! The 520 Bridge opened 50 years ago today — August 28, 1963. On the same day that local dignitaries gathered for a ribbon cutting ceremony on Lake Washington, Martin Luther King led millions in the March on Washington in DC. Unrelated facts? Not in the least.

But before getting to that, WSDOT has been celebrating 50 years of floating across State Route 520 by collecting stories about the highway. Their “520at50 Memory Lane” website and Twitter campaign allows people to write their own bits of local history:

My friends and I rode our bikes from our Ravenna homes to be a part of the festivities. We got there well before the crowds arrived and stationed ourselves in position to see the cutting close up… I do remember that my friends and I broke the ribbons before they were cut and we held them together until after the official cutting took place. Each of us had a bit of those pieces of plastic in our pockets as we rode our bikes back home that day. — David Oehler

… when my girlfriends mom let me user her Vespa scooter while my car was being repaired. I would then drive across the bridge, under construction on the Vespa. The first time the construction guys said I couldn’t go but I told them I had to get to class after visiting my girlfriend. They recognized a true romance in the making and let me cross every day for about a month until the bridge opened when I had to pay tolls like everyone else, 25 cents. — Chris Warner

Looking back, we joke that our early years at Seward School dealing with constant SR 520 and I-5 construction noise is the reason we were stunted intellectually. — Anonymous

The site has a bunch of historical photos, documents and vintage video showing the bridge under construction in the early 60s. The silent footage is worth watching for scenes of workers throwing hot rivets, burning tree stumps (is that the Arboretum?) and a cable safety gate stopping a charging dump truck before the drawspan. The gate wins. Sort of.

WSDOT has also published a more substantial history website of the corridor as part of the 520 highway replacement project: 520history.org. The site, developed in partnership with HistoryLink, broadly covers the tribes that once lived between Portage and Union Bays, the industrialization of Lake Washington and tells the more “official” history of the 1960s floating bridge construction. Lots of interesting new material there.

As commendable as these efforts to record history are, there are many stones left unturned. While there is mention of the freeway politics behind the Montlake-Medina route choice for 520 over Kirkland-Sandpoint — (Montlake’s wetlands and garbage dumps were easier obstacles to overcome) — there is nothing about the discourse of those debates including “white flight” fears of diminished property values and “social change.” And most glaringly missing from the story: the grass-roots citizens’ protest that later defeated 520’s planned successor, the R.H. Thomson Expressway through the Arboretum and Central District. Eugene Smith’s 2004 book Montlake: An Urban Eden touches on this, noting how Seattle Mayor Gordon Clinton framed the city’s preferred Thomson route:

[Clinton] wrote Senator Warren Magnuson in November, 1960, to … “preserve the Arboretum as a priceless asset to the City and the State.” He acknowledged that condemnation of private property was necessary and that it would cost half a million dollars more than Plan A, as determined by city-appointed appraisers. Their report had observed that, if the right-of-way left the homes on the east side of 26th Avenue, “the present owners will tend to move elsewhere . . . [and] their replacements are apt, and almost certain, to be of a lower social stratum and will drop the quality and, hence, the value of the whole Montlake Peninsula.” Plan B, on the other hand, would produce a “very minor reduction of values in the total Montlake Peninsula [and] would more than offset the added cost of the private property acquisition.”

The state’s costs are $9.9 million to fix damage to the first batch, when a poorly designed corner section broke apart at Grays Harbor; another $48.8 million to seal cracks in the first batch, including the drydock work; and $22.4 million for extra work needed to strengthen the second batch. Construction is now under way on the third of six batches at Grays Harbor.

The overruns will be paid to contractor Kiewit-General through the project’s risk reserve fund (a sort of rainy day budget provision) which currently stands at $100 million after the charges announced today. Given that the change orders for the cycle 2 pontoons in the Aberdeen casting basin were $22 million, adding similar work for cycles 3-6 could approach draining the remaining reserve. Those cost figures will be finalized later this year.

With the pontoon repairs now well under way, WSDOT expects the new floating bridge to open in late-2015 or early-2016.

The new 520 Bridge is on the move again. Tugboats Westrac and West Point towed the east end “Pontoon W” back out to Elliot Bay last night, on its way to a Harbor Island dry dock for structural repairs. Of all the recent pontoon movements through the Lake Washington Ship Canal, W’s retreat made for an awkward, if not surreal, scene.

Image: @HeatherGrafK5

Image: @andrewbernathy

Image: @stefgg

Also surreal, this time-lapse video showing crews digging a 25′ trench and installing a fish culvert under 520 during last weekend’s closure:

Coming on the heels of last week’s Bicycle Urbanism Symposium and the mixed reviews bike expert John Pucher gave Seattle streets, it will be interesting to hear how the candidates respond. Pucher praised the Seattle greenway movement — optimizing low-traffic residential streets for walking and biking — but said certain arterial streets were worse than anything in Manhattan. Knowing the candidates’ attitudes toward street improvements will help Montlake residents figure out who best to lead the city through 520 replacement planning, including the $300 million Montlake Lid.

How do you connect a new 6-lane floating bridge to an old 4-lane highway? That’s the challenge for the next phase of 520 construction set to begin next month — the West Connection Bridge. This will be an interim span allowing the new floating bridge to transition to the existing 520 West Approach near Madison Park.

Mowat-American A Joint Venture will build the 1,330-foot-long structure under a $22.1 million contract. Completion is expected late next summer.

WSDOT has carefully planned the 520 replacement project in phases so that each new section will function until future sections are complete. When the new floating bridge opens, it will merge its 6-new-lanes into 4-old-lanes on the Seattle side. This interim West Connection will keep traffic moving until the next phase is complete.

However, the next phase, the West Approach Bridge North (WABN), has for the moment an uncertain future. The House Transportation Budget in April sought to delay WABN’s construction start from 2014 until 2015, or until tolls are implemented across the I-90 floating bridge. The WABN phase has been unpopular in Seattle, as it would continue the new 6-lane corridor all the way to Montlake Blvd with no funding in place to complete the rest of the $1.4 billion project. Given the dire budget situation in Olympia, Seattleites are leary of a bait-and-switch leaving us with even worse traffic in Montlake.

The fate of WABN will be settled just as soon as a budget deal is decided in Olympia (next week?). And while the West Connection is expected to finish next summer, delays with the floating bridge pontoons may push its completion into 2015.

To learn more about the project and its parts and pieces, you can talk directly with WSDOT folks at a series of public outreach events in Seattle next week:

The second cycle of new 520 Bridge pontoons that floated out of Aberdeen last month is now on the move, with the first tugboat delivery to Lake Washington expected this afternoon between 3-6pm. The surreal sight of a 360-foot-long concrete box floating through the Ballard Locks and Montlake Cut could make tonight’s rush hour commute more interesting than usual. The other new pontoons are, for the time being, heading to various moorage sites around the state, as crews are still working to fix the cracks in the first cycle pontoons delivered to Medina last summer.

Via WSDOT:

Drivers, boaters and residents around Lake Washington should be on the lookout for State Route 520 bridge pontoons moving through the lake this month.
Contractor crews will float one pontoon through the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Ballard between 3 and 6 p.m. this afternoon, Wednesday, May 15. A pontoon already on the lake will be moved from its current staging location to another location on the lake, making way for a pontoon from Aberdeen to use that staging area when it arrives on the lake later this month.

Two of the six pontoons recently constructed in Aberdeen have been towed to a moorage site in Tacoma and a third is on its way later this week. The final two pontoons from the second cycle of pontoons built in Aberdeen will remain moored in Grays Harbor until they are needed for bridge construction.

On Lake Washington, crews will prepare four pontoons from the first cycle built in Aberdeen for additional modifications recommended by an expert review panel in February. The Washington State Department of Transportation is coordinating with floating bridge contractor Kiewit/General/Manson, A Joint Venture, to finalize the details and timeline of the work.

The second cycle of pontoons for the new 520 Bridge floated out of the casting basin in Aberdeen early this morning, complete with additional post-tensioning to avoid the cracks that plagued the first cycle last year. “We have now constructed 24 out of the 77 bridge pontoons we need for the new floating bridge,” said Julie Meredith, SR 520 program director. The pontoons will be moored in Grays Harbor for inspections before being towed to Lake Washington when needed.

Despite the progress, it is not clear when the new bridge will be done. Ambitious hope for an early opening in 2014 ended with the Gregoire Governorship. WSDOT’s construction contract with Kiewit General requires a July 2015 completion, yet fixes to the first set of pontoons and additional structure for those remaining are adding unknown cost and time to the project.

WSDOT is in negotiations with its contractors for pontoon issues encountered in spring 2012 and has not made an official determination on any potential schedule effects.

Another cloud of uncertainty hangs over 520 due to the legislature’s failure to pass a transportation budget before the end of session yesterday. That work will be left for a special session, likely to begin in mid-May. Lawmakers will have to decide to press ahead with the piecemeal West Approach Bridge North, scheduled for June 2014, or wait until full funding is secured to complete the Seattle-side of 520. Seeing how an aggressive schedule has so far cost the state $100 million in avoidable mistakes — and the likelihood of a public vote to fill the $1.4 billion funding gap — there’s good reason to think a pause is in order.